LONDON

WikiLeaks founder blasts publisher for autobiography

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange lashed out at a British publisher for releasing drafts of a memoir without his approval Thursday, saying he did not author the book or get the opportunity to check it.

British publisher Canongate announced that the book, billed as an “unauthorized autobiography,” will go on sale in stores and online Thursday. Canongate paid the 40-year-old Assange for the rights to the memoir last year. It said that Assange began working with a ghostwriter on the book, but later backed out.

It said that since he had not repaid his advance, it had decided to publish the first draft that the WikiLeaks founder delivered to the publisher in March.

Assange disputed that account in a statement released exclusively to The Associated Press, accusing the publisher for “profiteering from an unfinished and erroneous draft.”

GUANTANAMO BAY NAVY BASE, Cuba

Captives’ tactic to stink up the prison is over for now

The waste war is over – for now.

War-on-terror captives are no longer smearing their cells with feces in a stomach-wrenching power struggle with the guards at the maximum security Camp 5 lockup. “That phase stopped in the last month or so,” said Army Col. Donnie Thomas in a Sept. 13 interview, noting the protest tactic “ebbs and flows.”

Mimicking a tactic once used by hundreds of Irish Republican Army prisoners in the 1970s, an undisclosed number of captives had been smearing their own excrement into the ventilation grates of their single-occupancy cells, causing it to waft through the cellblocks.

The colonel credited the closure of that chapter to a combination of peer pressure by fellow prisoners sickened by the tactic as well as guard force persuasion.

— From news service reports